Resilience – Your Leader

Already years ago, a student who partly worked for the same Automotive Company where I was employed for many years gave me this feedback after a conversation, when he said: “Rita, your resilience marker seems to be very strong – you always get back up!”

But, do we really “just” get back up or do we decide to get back up, after every setback?

This resilience factor always kept me thinking but I never went after it because my result still is positive, so – why care deeply? Until the day I read a new book. Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., discusses the resilience factor in one of his science books. He mentions that the prefrontal cortex, site of executive functions as planning and judgment (!) and highest cognitive activity, also controls how emotionally resilient people are. Resilient people show a higher activity (by thirty times (!)) in a specific brain region than those who are not “so” resilient. At the other end of this line, the people need a longer time to recover from setbacks.

But all this is not fix! We are able to learn. We all keep learning. And we use our brain to learn. So when the “get back up” factor is implemented in our brain, it gives us the permission to change the factor as well as we change our car driving ability within years, our active sports ability (we ALL are able to win Championships!) and our (foreign) language or communication ability – we can improve! Everything.

And it´s a fact, that the resilience factor involves our decision making ability. Dealing with setbacks strongly belongs to deciders. Getting back up fast and standing on both feet again for the team, is remarkable. As much as it is obvious that people who need a longer time to recover may need our support.

If you have trouble understanding why you´re not yet THE strong decider you always wanted to be, reflect about your life, and be honest. Set a marker to how resilient you´ve been so far with all the big and smaller setbacks you had to face. If you´re somehow trapped – it might be the resilient trap you need to escape from!

Learn to deal with problems and develop your problem-solving skills. Face and learn from conflict situations. Conflicts are mainly handled with an improved communication.

You can start today with deciding to improve your resilience factor, or anything else. Challenge yourself and set the goal to get back up faster than before. Look at what brings you down: problems? Conflicts? It´s a training – start it! The better you get the more calculated risks you will take – and the bigger the reward you get!